Everyman in His New Drama: Erin Cressida Wilson's The Trail of Her Inner Thigh

Every man in his drama has a story to tell, of every woman, and every woman in these stories falls under age-old categories—mother, wife, daughter, whore—and she usually speaks well-worn lines that confirm that the man’s drama is not dramatic. It’s his story. What these women say proves to be an expression of that man, his fantasies and realizations, and so they are aspects of him, his good deeds, temptation, knowledge, faith, and so on, standing in judgment before God, who is also him, or rather He. There is no drama to that drama because there is no other voice. It’s an epic, no matter how it lays out on the page. The epic tradition keeps the other voice in quotation marks; the drama puts it in play.

Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, the most distinguished example of masculine “epic” nondrama, is one of the more repellant plays of this century because it so fervently wants to be a modern morality play, an “Everyman,” at that moment when the liberal ego stood on the brink of realizing that it could not comprehend morality. Critics reviled Miller’s play for its “exploitation” of the recently dead Marilyn Monroe, but it is really the exploitation of Arthur Miller himself, in his character Quentin, that turned their stomachs. Here is a play that builds the world from the writhing, guilty ego of the author, and it is no wonder that nothing happens in that world, nothing basically changes, because Miller’s character is unto himself. The passage of time simply confirms that the author is still alive and in your face. The women in that play exist by virtue of the man’s experience, and they complete the picture of a world in which his life holds meaning, but they have no ground to stand on and so remain always abstract.

Wallace Shawn, in his recent play The Designated Mourner, has brilliantly updated and reanimated Miller’s portrayal of the male liberal conscience, in a form that remains fundamentally as undramatic as Miller’s. Shawn’s Achilles makes bold to tell that a certain amount of time in any hero’s tent is devoted to private pleasures, especially when the field of battle seems so distant and absurd. The epic hero of this nondrama answers the cry of conscience with a carefree “fuck it,” and the women of his play, like the other men, finally just stop talking. Where are the Bacchae when you really need them?

Erin Cressida Wilson, in The Trail of Her Inner Thigh, has managed to come to terms with the nondramatic, talk-it-out story form and make it play. It is a realtor’s miracle that she has found a way to house fully realized female characters in this fixer-upper, the male monodrama. The main characters in her piece include one man, Kasper, and four women—his mother, his wife (or mate, anyway), his daughter, and a whore. A glance at the list of characters seems to say it all. It’s the well-worn configuration, the time-honored array, and Kasper has the classic problems sorting out familial and sexual relations among these women. The whole thing is his story: He tells us of a guy who got used as a teenager by an older woman to make her pregnant. She took off, and now, many years later, under strange compulsion, he goes on his odyssey to find the child of his loins before his own mother goes to her grave. He’s the one who’s always on stage, always introducing characters by his own perceptions of them. If Kasper didn’t spot them, they wouldn’t appear. But in this case it’s her inner thigh on which the experience is traced. The...